Lost ball sent boy on 800-mile Indian trip

Dean Nelson in Delhi

A missing seven-year-old boy has been reunited with his family four months after he accidentally kicked his football inside a freight carriage and then got trapped on the moving train as he tried to get it back. Mohammed Fazlu was playing close to the railway tracks when his ball was kicked aboard the train, which carried him 812 miles from his Bangalore home.

A missing seven-year-old boy has been reunited with his family four months after he accidentally kicked his football inside a freight carriage and then got trapped on the moving train as he tried to get it back. Mohammed Fazlu was playing close to the railway tracks when his ball was kicked aboard the train, which carried him 812 miles from his Bangalore home.

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Lost ball sent boy on 800-mile Indian trip

Independent.ie

A missing seven-year-old boy has been reunited with his family four months after he accidentally kicked his football inside a freight carriage and then got trapped on the moving train as he tried to get it back. Mohammed Fazlu was playing close to the railway tracks when his ball was kicked aboard the train, which carried him 812 miles from his Bangalore home.

He was discovered by railway police in Vellore district, in Tamil Nadu.

Local child-welfare officials put him in a home for runaways while they searched for his family, but Mohammed wrongly told them he was from Mumbai.

Ruby Nakka, who led the search, said Mumbai police had no record of Mohammed being reported missing.

Carers at the home also noticed he talked in a language spoken in the state of Karnataka, and common in Bangalore, and then expanded their search.

Eventually, officials invited local TV channels to join the search and got an almost instant result. Mohammed's brother Roshan Zameer (3) was watching TV when he called out to his parents that Mohammed "had climbed inside the television and was speaking from inside".